A politics of exclusion: The literary criticism of Virginia Woolf

Though Virginia Woolf\u27s giant achievements in modernist fiction have long been recognized, an analysis of the body of her critical work, of her more than 500 essays, reviews, and articles, has yet to be undertaken. Either critics have looked at scattered essays, most notably Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown and Modern Fiction, for Woolf\u27s theories of the novel; or at her feminist manifesto, A Room of One\u27s Own, for her analysis of what it means to be a middle-class, white woman writer in a patriarchal society. Neither group of critics--neither those who are primarily interested in her literary aesthetics, nor those who highlight her feminism--have examined the feminist aesthetics of Woolf\u27s entire critical opus. In addition to investigating Woolf\u27s current position as a literary critic among both feminist and non-feminist critics, this project treats Woolf as a cultural critic who assiduously reader the symbols, structures, events, and written texts of her culture. Woolf\u27s cultural criticism extends into an analysis of the institution of writing about literature or, more specifically, reviewing. As someone who spent the first half of her writing career as a reviewer--from 1904 until 1922, the release of Jacob\u27s Room, most of her published writings were for newspapers--Woolf was in a position to know the ins and outs of the reviewing profession. As a cultural critic Woolf was thorough in her examination, taking into account the genre, in terms of form, content and ideological implications; the reviewer, in terms of her (for the reviewer usually was a woman) suitability for this occupation; the reader, in terms of enlightening and entertaining her or him; and the location of the institution of reviewing in the broader network of the writing profession. Woolf\u27s analysis is marked by complexity and ambivalence. She held contradictory ideas from the time she articulated them early on in her life until her death in 1941. Sometimes, as my analysis shows, Woolf was not always in control of the contradictions she revealed; there are conflicting and inconsistent arguments within her body of criticism on the review, arguments which she did not resolve--nor want to. Though she may have leaned more on one side than another, it was enough to make apparent the contradictions that exist within any institution